On the Effect of the Great Recession on US Household Expenditures for Entertainment

This paper empirically investigates potential effects of economic recessions on consumers¡¯ decision making process for recreational activities using the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CES) data during the Great Recession. We employ the Probit model to study how changes in income affect the likelihood of making non-zero expenditures on entertainment activities. We also use the Tobit model to assess the income effect on those activities in the presence of censored observations. We found overall statistically significant effects of recessions on leisure activities, which may explain sluggish adjustments of leisure consumption during recessions.